Loving and reproducing

Sexuality without reproduction and reproduction without sexuality combined bring to the fore the radically contingent nature of love relationships and reveal otherness as the immutable condition of ‘being with’. The societies in which we live increasingly intervene in their own reproduction. First and foremost the biological basis of human behaviour becomes a target for social intervention and manipulation, with human reproduction itself emerging as a prime object of such interference. Consequentially, reproduction ceases to be a destiny and is finally transformed into a field of decision, action, and choice. But whose choice? Of individuals responsible for their own existence and thus presumably capable of deciding, or at least deciding whether to decide? Or of scientific, medical, and social apparatuses which fix the codes of behaviour, the canons of normality and of pathology?

The fact that reproduction is de facto no longer preordained introduces an aspect of a new and radical ambivalence into our cultural life. While the growth of information, medical progress, and changing morals and sexual customs offer men and women a new range of reproductive choices as well as responsibilities, the external control of their behaviour simultaneously increases. Such control is exercised not just through the manifest action of repressive apparatuses or authoritarian norms; it also operates through symbolic codes which govern our behavior and via the manipulation of the bio-psychological bases of human action.

In contemporary societies the reproduction of the human species has thus ceased to be a fact of nature.